Intro to Django at Mahalo
July 25, 2011 | Tag: » Django, Events
Last Saturday the PyLadies and the LA Django meetup group held an introductory Django Workshop, with generous amounts of support by Mahalo and Cars.com Guided by Sandy and Katharine, two of the PyLadies' Djangologists extraordinaires, the morning tutorial covered the basics of setting up a Django web application, from database configuration to navigating the built-in admin interface.
As you can see, mentors circulated the room throughout the workshop; Michael of Cars.com brought party hats for us to wear so that people knew who to ask for help as they set up their first Django web app. To maintain the party-like atmosphere we also had slides of Python-trivia questions, and threw candy at participants who got answered them correctly! Do YOU know what BDFL stands for?
For lunch we dined on pizza donated by Cars.com, while soaking in some much-needed vitamin D, and spent some time getting to know our fellow hackers a bit better.
Introducing ourselves, we discovered that we came from a wide range of backgrounds, from meditation experts to bioengineers, united by our eagerness to learn this awesome Python-based framework, and our willingness to spend a whole Saturday doing so!
These folks came all the way from Texas!!!
In the afternoon, most attendees chose to push on through the Django tutorial with Sandy, where they delved deeper into Django views and templating. Others hacked away happily on their own Python projects, and later we all learned how to set deploy our apps on DjangoZoom, for which the DjangoZoom folks were generous enough to give us trial accounts. There was, of course, time for a short outdoor break (PyLadies are all about promoting well-rounded, healthy hacking habits!), led by Python dev/capoeira enthusiast PyDanny.
The hackday finished with another fine set of lightning talks:
- Katharine gave an awesome talk on how to keep up with the PyLadies
- Randall gave a presentation on the awesome Django-Twilio API, for adding telephony features to web apps
- Michael gave tips on applying for programming jobs, aimed at n00bs but containing good advice for any job-seeker.
- Laura showed us how to use the Python wrapper for the Twitter API
- The indomitable Sandy found it in her to give another talk, this time on Django testing
Since no PyLadies event is complete without a social hour, we walked over to Warszawa for a round of drinking and relaxation (i.e., we began formulating plans for tattoos, future PyLadies events, continued world domination, etc).
Thanks again to our wonderful hosts at Mahalo, particularly CTO Jeff; and also to the crew of Cars.com, most notably Michael, who helped out enormously with every aspect of the event, from tweaking the tutorial to handing out candy for trivia. Also, the hats!
Finally, and as always, thanks to the PSF for their continued support. We were able to fit twice as many people into our hack space using the tables and chairs they paid for. We’ll also be thanking them in the near future when we announce a few other exciting new developments…
Stay on our mailing list to hear more! Or, if that’s not enough PyLadies for you, you know where else to find us!
By Esther Nam